My Open Source Journey

Diversity FAD 2017 Event Report

The Fedora Diversity FAD (Fedora Activity Day) is a regional event that allows Fedora contributors to gather together in order to work on specific tasks related to the Fedora Project. It took place during the weekend of DevConf, 27-29 January.

What is Fedora Diversity?

Fedora Diversity is a new initiative in the Fedora community. The Diversity Team supports and encourages all kinds of different people to join and contribute in Fedora. We also aim to better understand the diverse community that composes Fedora and the unique needs and wishes of the groups that make up Fedora. Since our team is new, we plan to accomplish primary and secondary goals of the Diversity Team for this year.

What we accomplished in the FAD

In our first FAD for the Diversity Team, we had the chance to all be together at the same place, at Red Hat offices, to work on the objectives we had for this event. Our primary objective was to finish a diversity survey for Fedora contributors/users so we could have feedback from our community to understand their background. This includes what they do, how many years they have been involved with Fedora, unique problems they some contributors may face that others do not, and so on.. The FAD had a massive impact on the progress of finishing our survey and coordinating with other people that helped us a lot during the process.

For the first two days, we worked on the questions that we could include in the survey. Brian Exelbeird (FCAIC) was able to join us for the entire weekend. We had a video call to talk with Marina Zhurakhinskaya and Tatica, who were there with us during the event to support and assist us with their experience. The last day of the event was mostly to finish our tickets on Pagure and to talk more about the idea of having a Fedora Appreciation Week. We’ve also decided to do some research on how other communities work on the related issues of participation and managing situations that go wrong. We know that all communities experience these issues, and in the spirit of Open Source we should study what others have done to adopt and adapt these existing ideas. We wanted to see other communities that came before us and our community practices should be built the same way. This is one of the tasks that each of has to fulfill and see how other communities are dealing with this.

Get involved with Fedora Diveristy

If anyone else wants to join our biweekly meetings, they are more than welcome to come on Freenode #fedora-meeting-1 on Wednesdays at 12:00 UTC.

PS: Many thanks to Amita, Bee, Brian, Justin, Marina, Radka and Tatica for all the work they are doing on the diversity team. Can’t wait to see them again.